


Javert Derailed

by literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Racism, Romani Character, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 12:54:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1819198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte/pseuds/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He saw his mother sometimes. She was brown skinned, and she spoke a language he did not understand. Javert would not admit he had learned a few words from her, could even speak on an elementary level, but, then again, no one asked about what language his mother spoke and what language he could have spoke if French hadn't been forced onto him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Javert Derailed

The dull black sky rolled over in its bed across the fleeing yellow sunset and flattened the world with night, and, at seven years of age, he came to the conclusion that everything on this world is cruel, embittered, and everything eventually led to unfairness, poverty, dirty hands in the dark begging for some sous.

Only in the following years would he feel the firm hand of justice pick him up by his scruff like a stray dog and offer him guidance and purpose. Until then he raged in despair and lounged in misery – unproductive, hateful, another scowling, filthy youth lost in the masses of France with other grim and grimy faces.

Javert does not remember when he began to look up to the law and respect it, admire it, seek its approval like he would the validation of a father, but he rarely looks to his own past. For others he is less indifferent.

However, he remembers and preserves the shame of his childhood. For the situation of his birth, he blames his parents, and in a way he also uselessly blames himself. For being born without any societal advantage, for being thrown aside into the mud puddles of France, for being born into a jail and carrying its chains as much as any other prisoner.

The police force seemed at first like a supernatural presence in his world – first terrifying in its authority, and then awe-inspiring in his need for escapism - until he gave up on hopes of magic and other happy ideas. Then Javert turned sour. His peers liked him even less when he picked up the habit of snitching and turning up his nose on everyone on the street. There was a time he gambled with whatever he could find on the road with orphans and other gamin, and then there became a time when he told the inspectors where to find those hidden corners in the city where young thieves bet all their crumbs of bread on piddly affairs.

It is difficult to describe how Javert feels about justice. Passionately. Desperately. He had no reason to grow up to love the law; the law certainly encouraged him to disappear into the streets like everything else that crawled out of the prisons with the rats.

The law looked at his mother, and looked back at him, and perhaps thought to sweep the road of spiders before kicking him out after her. He was granted a minimal of privilege, but Javert was a smart child. Reading he loathed to do, but he studied up on whatever books he could get his grubby hands on. He liked the astronomy books, because the grandiose pictures appealed to him. Heavenly and organized spires of cosmos, maps with slabs of the universe documented for his finger to run over, constellations he dreamed of being apart of, and he saw stars in the uniforms of the police.

He read books on religion, but all he could think of as he glared at the pages was the sound of a church choir spilling out onto the street, the windows and doors like prison bars to keep people like him out, the painted windows of white angels and white priests. Still, Javert dutifully read, if only to prove some stubborn part of himself that he could.

He saw his mother sometimes. She was brown skinned, and she spoke a language he did not understand. Javert would not admit he had learned a few words from her, could even speak on an elementary level, but, then again, no one asked about what language his mother spoke and what language he could have spoke if French hadn't been forced onto him. 

As she looked at her hands, and he looked at his own – they were not the same color, his skin lighter and whiter and more like the painted windows in the condescending churches. He had bushy eyebrows and long hair like hers, but he had skin that allowed him to join the police force, he could not speak her language, and he was never long enough with her to learn anything at all about where she had come from. Anyway, he would have resisted the information, despised it, been ashamed of it, and the sad look in her eyes, the dry pain that haunted her, noticed how shameful her child was, and so she never told him anything he would regret.

However, he did recoil at hearing g**sy, and, behind all the proud dreams of justice, he did recognize something in the word Romani. He did recognize what being a child of his mother meant to him, vaguely, under all the years of strict rules for himself and hard work for his idealized view of the law.

All in all he would have much rather preferred to look like his mother than whoever his father was, because his father was probably scum, and Javert was not scum.


End file.
